Albany Civic Theater’s artistic director, Carol King has taken
Thornton Wilder’s immortal classic, 1938’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
Our Town, and rendered it in classic community-theater
fashion. Our Town has stood the test of time: It is
performed all over the world, and it has had all manner of
interpretations concerning its godlike Stage Manager—even
playwright Thornton Wilder played the role, and directors
have been bold enough with “nontraditional casting” to use
women, teenagers, even multiple actors in a role traditionally
cast as a white, senior-citizen male to explore the emotions,
philosophy, and nuances of the play. And it’s survived being
part of the American literary canon for high schools where
students often study symbolism more than substance and theme
more than emotion.

King’s version is heavy on Our Town as literature,
making her production more a museum exhibit than a play. Two
green outlines of doorframes stand downstage left and right
leading to matching stairs mid-left and -right. Two matching
small round wooden tables with two matching wooden chairs
each stand mid-center stage, framed immediately upstage by
two brown flats. An old fashioned “ghost light” dead center
stage rounds out the set of a play famous for its minimal
set requirements. “For those who that feel they have to have
scenery,” the Stage Manager (Patrick White) kindly says of
the door frames. The edges of light harden on faces as the
players stomp around the stage. The sound of chickens clucking
or train whistles blowing or church bells ringing punctuates
the line readings, which are recalled often with some obvious
effort. Some care has gone into early-20th- century costuming
of the female troupers, while the male participants wear an
eclectic mix of double-breasted suits and three-button suit
coats.

Patrick White does make a comfortable, avuncular Stage Manager,
welcoming the audience to the friendly neighborhood that is
ACT’s Grover’s Corners. He is pleasant, makes eye contact,
and is calm, as if he belonged here and wanted his audience
to settle in for a satisfactory time. But there are no challenges
here; Grover’s Corners is “a very ordinary town . . . probably
a lot duller” than most, as Wilder writes. Yet while the Stage
Manager knows past, present, and future—he even tells the
audience he’s going to have a copy of Our Town put
in a cornerstone of the new bank so “people a thousand years
from now” will know “this is the way we were in our growing
up and in our marrying, in our living, and in our dying”—there’s
none of the poetry and the pathos that can make seeing Our
Town a transcendent experience.

Our Town can be something more; the play begins with the
Stage Manager prophesying the death of characters, and Our
Town ends in the Grover’s Corners’ cemetery with the dead
who, as the Stage Manager states, “don’t stay interested in
us living people for very long.” Life and death are pretty
big themes. But you can only mourn those who were once alive.
And for that to happen, a production has to have a higher
standard than just saying memorized words as the performers
execute the director’s blocking. Someone has to breathe. This
Our Town achieves the remarkable effect of not letting
the audience members for a moment forget that they are just
listening to words memorized in a play spoken by friends and
relatives. As one character states, “Do any human beings ever
realize life while they live it—every minute?” At ACT, the
answer is a complacent no.